AWS have recently announced a memorandum of understanding with Crown Commercial Services, called the One Government Value Agreement (OGVA). OGVA is intended to help UK public sector customers to accelerate their use of and derive greater value from AWS Cloud services. It is available for use by any UK public sector organisation (as defined in the CCS G-Cloud Framework) or others by mutual agreement.
As an AWS partner on the Solutions Provider Program, Jisc is able to offer OGVA to our higher and futher education members and to our public sector customers. OGVA is not a framework, so organisations will need to follow their usual procurement procedures in order to take advantage of it, e.g. direct award, G-Cloud, tender, etc.
As well as being a qualifying public sector organisation, organisations have to meet a number of other criteria and make a number of commitments (details on request). In return for these commitments, organisations will realise a significant discount on AWS cloud services.
In addition to the discount, OGVA defines a series of benefits across two tiers, each aligned against the needs of a different type of customer; foundation (smaller customers or customers at the beginning of their cloud journey) or enterprise (larger organisations or customers who are looking to take significant steps towards cloud). These benefits comprise access to a package of accelerator deals, training, round table events, webinars and more (dependent on the tier).
Our analysis concludes that OGVA would primarily suit organisations that are either new to AWS or that have already optimised their AWS estate and that plan to grow their consumption. OGVA is effectively an investment for growth, as a route to consume more at a discounted rate when committing to long term use of AWS.
Please enquire for more information – cloud@jisc.ac.uk.
Please note that other public cloud providers have also agreed similar memoranda of understanding with CCS including Microsoft and Google.
Organisations in HE, FE and research should look out for forthcoming announcements about the OCRE Framework, which will also offer significant savings on the purchase of public cloud services.